BOISE, Idaho — The City of Boise is once again processing the plastic that goes in those orange bags for recycling.
The city now supports sending the bags to a Utah cement manufacturing facility to be used as an energy source at least until September 2020, when an environmental analysis has completed peer review, Boise Public Works spokesman Colin Hickman said Tuesday in a news release.
Boise's Hefty EnergyBag program, launched in 2018, allows expanded recycling of plastics that are not accepted as loose items in the blue no-sort recycling cart.
Only plastics labeled with a "1" or "2," such as soda bottles, milk jugs or detergent jugs, are accepted as loose items. Other plastics go in the orange bags, which can then be tossed into the blue cart.
While the city, through Republic Services, has never stopped collecting the orange bags, the original destination, Renewlogy, stopped accepting materials in 2019. That company needed to upgrade its equipment to better handle the mix of plastics.
The City of Boise elected to store EnergyBags until an environmental analysis could be conducted to better understand the impact of using the bags, and the plastics in them, as a fuel source for the cement plant in place of traditional fuels such as coal.
The preliminary findings of that analysis, Hickman said, have shown that using the EnergyBags in cement manufacturing has "several environmental benefits compared to landfilling the bags."
Boise also will send the bags to Renewlogy once that facility is ready to accept them again.
Boise Public Works' website has a quick reference guide and more detailed information about the EnergyBag program.
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